General comments

The complexities of this proposal and the circumstances it describes make my head ache. In spirit of Swift, I am tempted to make the immodest proposal the we quietly suppress any resources with these conditions. Absent that, it does appear that the proposal presents the best mechanism for coherently treating the situation. MYERS, MARBI Liaison, 2011/08/17

This proposal would have a significant impact on music cataloging; it's unfortunate that no musical examples were included.

- Glennan (PCC), 8/22/11

I initially wondered if a distinction should be made in the terminology used between an incomplete work and an incomplete collection of works (or expressions). However, I suspect that's really splitting hairs....

- Glennan (PCC), 8/22/11

The distinction you mention in Section E below might be the more useful one. Or a distinction between collections of works or extracts of works, and extracts that themselves become something that might normally be thought of as a work (in common parlance, not FRBR). An example would be the work named in LCCN n 79028260, where an organ suite whose movements come from various Domenico Gabrielli sonatas gets the u.t. "Sonatas. Selections." I have a notion, however, that this is too squishy a thing to delineate.

Scharff, MusLA, 8/23/11

CC:DA's discussion at our Annual meeting included a couple of additional topics. There was a suggestion that "Works, Incomplete" might be a useful alternative to "Selections."

Also, in our discussion of how "Selections" is used, the idea of taking a completely different direction was raised: articulating the content in shorthand, as in "50 poems" or "3 novels". There was a burst of applause at this suggestion, but we did not have time to explore the idea more fully at the meeting.

- Robare, 9/26/11

Background

Treatment of Selections in RDA

Section 1 : Selections as a preferred title for a part of a work

If you have "selections" from a single work, instead of the complete work itself, I wonder if we're already talking about expressions. Per FRBR 3.2.1, "A work is an abstract entity; there is no single material object one can point to as the work."

Do excerpts or selections from a work also constitute an abstract entity, or does extracting portions of a work inherently move us into the realm of expressions? If so, how would this approach inform the rest of the discussion of this situation?

Of course, one could have selections from a complete work or selections from an expression (say a translation or an arrangement of a musical work); I suspect that's really the issue here.

- Glennan (PCC), 8/22/11

1C.

Musical sketches are a special kind of problem, and I don't think they really should be used as an example here. Composers have different kinds of sketches: 1) ideas that get turned into a particular composition (say sketches for Schoenberg's opera Moses und Aron) or 2) ideas that never make it into any composition. The latter case is not exactly "Works. Selections (Sketches)", since the ideas never really became works.

- Glennan (PCC), 8/22/11

Section 2 : Selections as an attribute of the expression

Section 3 : Appendix E

LC Recommendations

I have some serious reservations about replacing the less-than-desirable term "Selections" with the equally less-than-desirable term "Extracts" or even "Excerpts". None of the terms represent an improvement in clarity. In fact, I have a hard time thinking that "excerpts" works when referring to an incomplete collection within a given form (e.g., "Sonatas, piano. Excerpts" could mean that just snippets from each sonata are contained in this collection, rather than what I think we'd want this to mean -- that each piano sonata contained in the collection is complete, however, not all of the piano sonatas by this composer appear in this collection).

What happens with backwards compatibility issues with AACR2 records? Do the kinds of changes proposed allow for machine-manipulation of existing headings to conform to the new RDA practice, whatever it might be? I'm personally not interested in split headings in my catalog records between
"Sonatas, harpsichord. Selections" and
"Sonatas, harpsichord. Extracts"

- Glennan (PCC), 8/22/11

Makes sense. Of the various replacements for "Selections", I prefer "Excerpts". It is frequently used in ads (e.g. "the video features excerpts from ..."), "extracts" is not. Plus "extract" has a physical connotation (an "extract" can also be a physical extract, e.g. an article removed from a periodical and treated as a separate entity) that I don't think excerpts has.

Proposed revision 1: alternative in 6.2.2.9.2

Proposed revision 2: alternative in 6.2.2.10.3

Proposed revision 3: deletion of 6.12.1.4

Proposed revision 4: alternative in 6.14.2.8.6

Proposed revision 5: instruction at 6.23.2.9.7

Just curious -- are the examples complete in this section, or do they just demonstrate the use of "Extracts"? My first reaction was that the 1st example would have "Authorized Version" appearing somewhere in the access point.

- Glennan (PCC), 8/22/11

Proposed revision 6: instruction at 6.23.2.10.3

Proposed revision 7: deletion of 6.25.1.5

I'm not clear on how proposed revision 5 eliminates the need for 6.25.1.5 (or maybe I'm still wondering about the examples there).

- Glennan (PCC), 8/22/11

Proposed revision 8: alternative at 6.27.2.3

Proposed revision 9: alternative at 6.28.2.3

Proposed revision 10: alternative at 6.30.2.2

Other revisions that would be needed

Impact on MARC 21

I would strongly advocate for:
1) consistent ordering of the subfields, regardless of how an expression came into being -- the coding will be equivalent whether the content is translated, then extracted or whether it is extracted, then translated.
2) putting language and format of content secondary to the scope of the content, that is, subfield k ($k) be given parity with subfield n ($n) so as to precede subfield l ($l) and subfield s ($s).
--MYERS, MARBI Liaison, 2011/08/17

In the Durant example of the Spanish spoken word extract, I recommend the order be Durant ... $t Story of civilization. $k Extracts. $l Spanish. $s Spoken word. As pointed out in the proposal, the access point through "Extracts" represents the work. Language is the next thing we would add for the expression. We then need to add something else only if there is more than one expression in Spanish. So it makes sense to me that the "Spoken word" piece should come after the language. Similarly, if the extracts were in English, we would add language first, then if there is more than one in English, we would add something further like Spoken word to qualify (Durant ... $t Story of civilization. $k Extracts. $l English. $s Spoken word.) Same reasoning for the ordering in the other examples. By the way, I thought the final qualifier was to be given in parentheses--e.g. see RDA 6.27.3, example "Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich, 1799–1837. Evgeniĭ Onegin. English (Beck)" -- so in the example in LCrep/2 wouldn't "Beck" be in parentheses? Actually in RDA I don't understand why the Beck example has the qualifier in parentheses and the Babar example has the "spoken word" qualifier outside of parentheses--what's the difference?
--Bob Maxwell, SAC Liaison, 18 Aug 2011

I agree that the order $k $l $s seems preferable to me in these examples. R.Rendall, 8/22/11

Amen, Kathy. For me, this proposal really points out how very important it will be to have much more sophisticated search and display mechanisms. Ordered lists of access points will always be very important to many users, and depending on what one is looking for, the placement of the elements makes a huge difference. In one search, it may be very important to have selections/excerpts/extracts come before language; in another search, it may be very important to have language first. (And of course that horrible question of whether we're dealing with an expression of selections of the work, or selections of an expression of a work. At times I think the difference could be quite critical, and the ordering of the elements can change the meaning to someone.) What is needed is the ability for the user to reorder results lists on the fly by whatever elements they desire. Of course though I realize we'd be foolish to base any practices on the hopes of common-sense features we'd like commercial vendors to provide for us... K. Randall, 8/24/11